Posted By: Sheri (http://www.sherisweb.com) on 'English'
Title: U.S. Mint struggling with penny shortage
Date: Fri Aug 13 14:29:14 1999
Taken from the Washington Post...
If there were more people like John Laskowski of Erie, Pa. a lot of federal
employees wouldn't be drawing overtime pay to produce pennies.
Laskowski recently deposited 89,650 pennies at Erie's National City Bank,
effectively eliminating the bank's penny shortage. But many banks along the
East Coast don't have a Laskowski or enough other people willing to empty
their mayonnaise jars, coffee cans or other containers filled with pennies.
The result is the great penny shortage of 1999, a mini-crisis that has forced
the U.S. Mint into around-the-clock operations six days a week at its plants
in Philadelphia and Denver. Penny production is 21 percent ahead of 1994,
the year of the last great penny shortage, and 33 percent ahead of last year,
the Mint said.
The shortage is more severe in the East and Midwest.
Statistically, there shouldn't be a crisis. The Mint says it has issued more
than 312 billion pennies over the past 30 years, enough to provide each
American with 426 pennies.
"It's hard for us to tell why it's happening," said Rose Planalto, a
spokeswoman for the Federal Reserve in Washington. "There just is more of a
demand.
"The economy is strong, people arent recirculating," she said. "And summer
is always a high demand period for coins. This is just the season for it."
Donn Pearlmann of the Professional Numismatists Guild, a group of coin and
currency experts, blames the banks. "People stash pennies away in old coffee
cans and sock drawers because most banks do not want to accept large amounts
of loose coins; they want them rolled and sorted." Planalto said the Fed has
been encouraging banks to accept coins for customers.
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